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Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
751–760 of 947 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just pointless smug contrarianism, I hope you're just in a bad mood and don't really believe or think this way regularly. Mining trucks are excellent candidates for battery electrification, Volvo is already building and selling them. What other things do you think are never happening that are infact already happening?
I really doubt it makes sense to use electric vehicles for mining, but I could be wrong. I guess we'll be able to see in the coming years what fraction of mining vehicles are electric. But what is wrong about what I stated? It's obviously impossible for solar to approach $0 because of the large material costs inherent in manufacturing solar panels and transporting electricity. This is not contrarianism, it's realism.…
Appreciate the thoughtful questions, and inquisitive responses! Great to see people figure out how we might push these closer to zero. We'll need to lower the costs of manufacturing solar panels and transporting electricity + raise the lifetime of panels.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#753Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really doubt it makes sense to use electric vehicles for mining, but I could be wrong. I guess we'll be able to see in the coming years what fraction of mining vehicles are electric. But what is wrong about what I stated? It's obviously impossible for solar to approach $0 because of the large material costs inherent in manufacturing solar panels and transporting electricity. This is not contrarianism, it's realism.…
While I wanted to agreee it's just contrarianism, he has a point. Mine electrification is going to come very, very slowly. There are 2 principal reasons, 1) mines run on a 24/7 schedule. There is not enough down time to charge batteries in a shift and with how completely filthy machines get we need better solutions for battery swapping in mining before that becomes an option, and 2) because (like the mine I am at rig…
Transporting energy long distances seems like such a waste. There's the cost of transporting fossil fuels or power lines for electricity.
What economics would it take for your mine to have its own solar or nuclear powered microgrid. What about when fossil fuel supplies are unreliable or interrupted.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#754Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Even more ideal if we can make a good building material out of the engineered plant to sequester Carbon. It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each pr…
This is being worked on. The problem is we are terrible at engineering biosystems, CRISPR currently works mainly to knockout genes rather than the kind of enhanced evolution you describe, and upscaling a solution to the point it can have a planetary impact is non-trivial.
This is the correct answer. We are abysmal at engineering biosystems. As Stewart Brand says "We are as gods and we must get good at it".
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run a VR startup so I'm biased, but: AR and VR. Different side of the same coin. But first (next 5-10 years) VR will be more mainstream, because it's easier to solve from a technological point of view.
In what sense are they different sides of the same coin? I see AR as very practical and VR not so much. I look at everyone walking down the street trying to simultaneous look down at their phone and do other things (walk, drive, etc) and see a huge TAM for AR. Meanwhile, in 1993 I went to the local fairground in my small town and experienced VR-enabled multiplayer game of Doom. It had much lower fidelity than VR toda…
> In what sense are they different sides of the same coin?
One should look at AR and VR as a spectrum. Eventually, you'll be able to mix and match with the same headset.
> Instead it's just been fits and starts for the past 26 years since I experienced that demo. Big tech has pumped huge money into VR the last 5 years and the uptake is just not happening.
This is incorrect. The Oculus Quest is super successful measured on any conceivable metric, outperforming (sales and retention-wise) any other headset that came before it.
One key barrier to adoption of VR (or any consumer tech) is convenience. The Quest is the first headset that makes it convenient to use VR, as you don't need a PC, no external trackers, but you still get the same level of immersiveness.
There are other areas that need improvement until it speak to a bigger TAM (such as improved resolution, more software, better performance, better ergonomics) - but those are all problems that have a more or less clear path of solution.
In 10 years, everyone will be working in VR headsets, not laptops.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#756I listened to Robert Green's talk at Google recently [0] He proposes the following idea: - Everybody born within 22 years of each other belong to a "generation" - Generations follow a cycle: - There is a rebellious generation - The next generation is trying to keep the ideals of the rebellious generation alive - The third generation is very conservative - The fourth generation is a "crisis" generation that will event…
> Everybody born within 22 years of each other belong to a "generation"
So everybody belongs to (up to) 44 generations?
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention quarter of a million dead per year due to medical errors. If we could even just reduce the number of medical errors by 10 percent, that'd be HUGE. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading... Unfortunately, it's a multi-trillion dollar industry with insanely entrenched and deep pocketed players, and the old boy network the likes of which us software people can't even imagine.…
Solving medical errors would be huge. The problem is that it's a long-tailed problem with no clear way to solve with software. Every error is different, and there are already lots of bureaucratic mitigations in place every step of the way. There are no algorithms capable of the general reasoning required to broadly spot all types of errors including de novo ones. The only way to truly guarantee no medical errors is t…
I bet just even solving the errors in diagnostics and/or catching stuff before it's too far gone would be huge in itself. I'm not talking AGI here, just bog standard perceptual stuff: looking at xrays, MRIs, mining medical records for patterns, handing unstructured medical records better, low hanging stuff like that.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#758My two cents:
- Privacy-focuses/Decentralized social networks
- E-Sports
- Food & Leisure
- Travel
- Climate-friendly services
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. Arguably, working on anything that doesn't help there is not just wasted effort, but actively harmful. Wind, solar power, energy storage still have huge room for improvement. Direct solar or wind -> liquid fuel will be essential to adapting fast. Windmills can drive production of liquid ammonia on farms (needing only air and water inputs), for use d…
> The most pressing problem for humanity is global climate disruption. Our climate and ecology are certainly at risk, but I think the biggest threat in the world right now is the rapid rise of fascist China. They're challenging the notion that free speech and democracy are required for capitalism and economic gain. China has grown so emboldened under President Xi that they're no longer content to just alter or buy ou…
Everything you fear about the rise of fascist China was far worse under the USSR in the latter 20th Century, and in fact far worse in China during that time too.
I’m not intending to downplay the impact on minorities within China, or their growing global influence. It’s just that what China is doing is fundamentally the same category of human and national behavior we have seen for 100 years. Relatively speaking, it is less destructive than what came before. We must address it but the tools to do so are available and obvious.
It pales before the threat of climate change because that is a new category of threat to global society.
Why? Because water, food, and real property are fundamental to the health and economies of all nations, and climate change will create massive unfunded changes to those. It’s one thing to have an aggressive nation on the world stage a la China. It’s quite another if hundreds of millions of people need to migrate and have no money to do so. The latter is well within the realm of possibility given what we know about climate change.
Re: Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
#760Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for: but I think CRISPR-Cas9 seems like the most exciting technology probably in all of science. It's a system that can be used to literally change the DNA of living creatures, and on top of that it's highly accessible. Think of the hacker culture today and now imagine the same rate of change for biological engineering. We'll have massive libraries of re-usable "components"…
I get the heebie jeebies when I hear computer technologists getting excited about gene editing.
Computing and biology are opposite one another as disciplines. Computing has been built up by people from invented principles; but in biology we are working our way down from observations to try to infer the principles underlying them.
It’s easy to look at our global computing infrastructure and think we are good at understanding complexity. But we built that; we should understand it. Again: not true for biology. There’s no guarantee that we will ever fully understand the full scope of how life works.
And computing still has problems! Side effects are rampant in software; we usually call those bugs or vulnerabilities and there are a lot of them.
And electronic computing has fewer ethical concerns. It’s generally not considered unethical to risk crashing a computer. Very different story if you are risking deforming foetuses